Slashdot Mirror
Individual Atom Memory Created
azav writes "University of Wisconsin-Madison Scientists have created "atomic scale" memory using individual atoms of Silicon." A cool photo can be found on the site as well.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
first post
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
and i don'
t fucking care about carma. since the numbers are gone, who gives a shit.
karma without numbers is like computer without program
Got it?
Single atom memory? How stable do they REALLY expect that to be?
Ha! What's the name of the technology? Alzheimer's Access Memory?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
n/t
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those
---
Business plan:
1. Make atomic memory thingy
2. ?????
3. Profit
---
This story is a repeat
---
There is a spelling mistake in the article
---
How long before the site is slashdotted
---
This is *not* a troll!!! The moderators are well out of order
---
Why don't we have a slashdot poll:
What is best:
(*) Atomic memory
(*) Magnetic storage
(*) Optical storage
---
How long before it is patented?
---
This is NOT news!!! How could you possibly put this on the front page, and yet you rejected my posts about Buffy and Microsoft doing something wrong, the moderators are well out of order.
---
Now that we have got all those over with in one go, can the trollers just shut up, and leave us alone - PLEASE? I think I covered eveything, but I'm sure I'll be corrected if not.
I am gay.
Please go on EFnet and spam my channel. It is #gnomercy on that network. Also, my e-mail address is chris@thesmartone.net. Please flood my inbox with spam and gay porn. Thank you.
-- Chris Sologuk
.. not to be too repetitive, but this was posted only a month ago..
0 8/0116255&mode=thread&tid=126
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/
Anonymous Coward
Gives an image of Twanee Stone!
What the hell did they write to it? I think I can see a naked lady in there...
Oh, nevermind, my browser window is translucent, and the pr0n site from one of my other window was coming through..
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
flamebait
It was the night before Goatse, when all through the house
Not a penis was stirred, not even with mouth;
The Giver was hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Goatse soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of anal-sex danced in their heads;
And Katz in his 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a fuck in the sack.
When up in my anus there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see Katz start to splatter.
Away to the bathroom I flew like a flash,
Tore open my anus and looked at the gash.
The moon in the glass had a vibrant red glow
Gave the lustre of sunset to my nutsack below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer!
With a little old driver, so lively and quickse,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Goatse.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, TACO! now, JAMIE! now, MICHEAL and TIMMY!
On, CHRISD! on HEMOS! on, PUDGEY and CLIFFY!
To the top of the ass! fronts to the the wall!
Now pound away! pound away! pound away all!"
As faggots that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with a hetero, mount the next guy,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of sex-toys, and Goatse pics too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The moaning and pawing of each little poof.
As I drew in my ass, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Goatse came with a bound.
He was dressed as a furry, from his head to his feet,
And his clothes were all tarnished with urine and shit;
A bundle of sex-toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a hooker just flapping his sack.
His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His ass cheeks like roses, his cock like a cherry!
His cute little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his scrotum as white as the snow;
The stump of a blunt he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and was a bit smelly,
He shook, when he wanked like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him beat off himself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings with smelly big turds,
He layed a big log right under my nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like a fucking great missile.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"HAPPY GOATSE TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!"
about moore's law?
And a brick wall?
Methinks there is no higher density than bit-per-atom.
hrm... bit per electron...
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Professor Farnsworth! Come Quickly!
If the yellow dot are atom, what are
the lines between them? smaller atom maby?
this picture is fake!
.. to state the obvious. This is about as revolutionary as using an egg carton for data storage. You move the eggs around to different places to indicate the data value. If you have a dozen egg cartons, you have 144 bits.
Whoopee! The only difference is the scale. I guess the scientist were surprised to find that the atoms stayed where they were left? I imagine that if I licked my finger and rubbed it over their "egg carton", that would be the end of their data.
So someone found a way to spend a lot of time using the electron microscope. I remember when some IBM staffers wrote "IBM" with single atoms. Maybe 5 years ago. Hopefully they patented the "technology".
The relentless slagging this "news" has received so far is heartily deserved.
"If you can read this, you're WAAAY too close!"
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
"Reading the memory consists of a simple, one-dimensional scan, because it is self-formatted into precise tracks. There is no need to search in two dimensions for the location of a bit. The signal is highly predictable since all atoms have the same shape and occur on well-defined lattice sites. That allows for a high level of filtering and error correction"
"Writing is more difficult. While atoms can be positioned controllably at liquid helium temperature, that is much harder to achieve that at room temperature"
You just have to start storing multiple states in one atom. The Quantum Computing people have been talking about that for years.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
May the year 5763 be a happy and healthy year for all the Jews,
and for that little bit of Jew in each and every one of us!
'Hi-res 200 dpi', the link reads.
Individual atoms visible on a 200 dpi scale? Whow! Let me fire up my 600dpi scanner to study the patterns of electrons!
I'm suffering from limp dick. Anyone know a remedy?
/%\
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-%/%|
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-' \//%\
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-'hhhhh \%/|%
hhhhhhhhhh _,-'hhhhh __,--
hhhhh _,-'hhhhh _,-'%(% ; %)%
hhhhh_,-'hhhhh _,-' %\%, %\
/ / ) _,-'hhhhhhhhhh'--%'
\__/_,-'
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
since we'll have enough memory capacity, we might be able to replicate states of electrons in our brain, in (atom) binary and compare instances... who knows what we'll find out, maybe we'll see every 2 seconds a similar structure (ie. sex?)
Just as long as you don't arrange atoms in a way that could, using some sort of algorithm, produce a recording of some popular music. Otherwise, the RIAA's nano-bots, will deconstruct your atoms.. with permission of the US government
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
..solve chess! :)
Karma. Moderation. Is my
Remember how it was possible to get old mainframe hard disks to walk across the floor with certain access patterns?
Remember how it was possible to heat up magnetic core memory with certain access patterns?
What is going to happen when you can make atoms randomly vibrate at will???
Doesn't it freak you out that the picture on the site looks kind of like a punched card???
In 1959, physics icon Richard Feynman predicted that all the words written in the history of the world could be contained in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide.
And then we'd need a new search engine just to find the damn thing.
Fortunately, the text would probably be stored in the innovative MS Word format, which guarantees that the physical size of the required storage capacity will remain constant over time, no matter what the information density of the storage medium.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Bartender replies "Are you sure?"
Atom thinks for a second: "Yea I'm positive."
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
I had an incredibly insightfull and informative post to make, but I stored it on an atomic scale memory smaller than a spec of dust. Now I can't remember where I put it.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I found a remarkable proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but this 512 terabyte memory cube is too small to contain it.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
$ solvechess
Please prepare and format 10 Dyson Spheres and fill them with crystalline silicon.
Please insert Dyson Sphere 1 and press enter...
Working..........(10%)
Please insert Dyson Sphere 2 and press enter...
Working...(13%), inf remaining.
Fun, fun, fun. And now we'll put those into a RAID 6+6. How many would you need at least and how many could fail before you lose any data? For bonus points, give the smallest possible distance you could leave between the spheres to keep them separated using no more than the power output of a Sol-like star on each and calculate the mass of all spheres combined. If possible draw a small diagram of how the spheres had to be placed for maximum stability.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Since most operating systems are 16 and 32 bit in nature, why do we continue to use binary memory? Why not have memory that can somehow represent 16 or 32 states?
If those are silicon atoms in the photo then what are the grooves in between the rows of atoms?
I know the secrets of the video game champs
If the picture is of atoms, what is under them?
I've always wondered that when I see an electron shot like this. Anyone know?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
great minds...
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
could a woodchuck chuck,
if a woodchuck could chuck atoms
For one thing, this has been posted already. If I remember correctly, I belive the problem was that they couldn't write to it at any reasonable speed.
http://www.mistersampo.com
Actually, they are all rougly the same size, regardless of atomic weight. This is one of the interesting things about quantum mechanics and atomic physics. *All* atoms are between 0.5 and 2.5 Angstroms (1e-10 m)with Cesium being the largest (bigger than Uranium) and Nitrogen? being the smallest. Silicon isn't very large, however.
Hydrogen's the smallest, according to my books, with a radius of something like 0.53 angstroms (been a while since I looked it up).
What confuses me is why the atomic radii don't go up as the square of the number of shells. The alkali metals will have a single electron in the outermost shell, with the nucleus shielded by the inner shells, and so having an apparent charge of one. This seems to give a system with size equivalent to the nth energy level of an electron in hydrogen, which goes up as the square of the shell number.
I and the friends I asked about this speculate that because the electrons in the sheilding shells are smeared out radially, the outermost shielding shell extends past the valence shell's nominal radius, and so the core is only partly shielded, but I haven't seen any description to date of how you work out what the radii actually end up being.
Any pointers/quick explanations?
Someone (one of the few people who made an *intelligent* reply, anyway) Mentioned memory density. Out of curiosity I decided to figure out exactly how much data per square inch you could fit using this tecnique... Silicon has a van der Waals (minimum, non-bonding) radius of 210pm, or 2.1e-10 meters (8.27e-9 inches). That means the closest you could possibly pack them is 4.2e-10 meters on-center (1.65e-8 inches). That means you can pack about 60,400,000 silicon atoms in single file, or a whopping 3,600,000,000,000,000 atoms per square inch! That boils down to about 415.7 terabytes! Comparatively, current holographic memory systems can (last I checked) reliably store up to 25.6 megabytes per square inch, but of course it has the added feature of using the full volume of the media, and extreamely fast read/write times. =Smidge=
... er, I wasn't going to look at it long enuf to decide how old she appeared... at least not at work.
You could've hired me.
There's a PDF of the real journal article available from Nanotechnology's site.
In the article they say that their atomic memory has an energy density of 250 terabits per square inch (compared to 100 gigabits per square inch for a hard drive). A CD-ROM has 14 square inches of recordable area. If one were to use this technique on a surface the size of a CD-ROM, that would give:
(14 square inches) * (250 terabits/square inch) / (8 bits/byte) = 437.5 terabytes
Incredibly huge, but I'm sure there's a number of people who would still be able to fill it up.
I hate it when all the guys bring their girlfriends to the LAN-Parties.
Sorry, but this contact one bit by one bit
fragile storage technology is best left
on the lab. table.
For those who missed it, their 778 gigabyte database of the complete Awari game tree could be stored on a piece of silicon approximately 4mm square. Wait, that's just on one side! Sweet, we'll keep MP3s on the other 778 gig side.
(0.778 terabytes) / ((250 terabits/sq.inch) / (8 bits/byte)) = 0.024896 sq.inch =~ 4mm square
Cos atoms have a habit of moving about.
Deleted
Well if you read the article, they evaporated gold on silicon and then more silicon on that. That is the substrate ("what is under them").
The reason it looks so flat is because you get a picture of an electron cloud from an electron microscope. You can't see the nucleus, it's a tiny point inside that fuzzy mess of electrons. So when you pack a bunch of conducting or semi-conducting atoms together, their electron clouds all join up, electrons go promiscuously from atom to atom, and the net appearance is one giant, flat electron cloud.
If you could somehow do a 3-D picture of a tiny ball of gold, it would just look like a sphere, because the electrons are all shared, and they would spread out evenly over the surface of the ball.
Remember they are bouncing electrons off the sample to make the picture. Like charges repel (negative in this case) so the electrons bounce off as soon as they get very close to another electron. That's why you see a picture of the electron clouds of the atoms. The atoms "reflect" the incoming electrons the way a big ship bounces radar signals. You see the outline of the ship (or the electron cloud) as the case may be.
Yet another great numerical product from the "out our asses for extortion and profit" corporation, LLC.
Call the copyRight police! I just found my latest script embeded in that atomic pattern (photo) - it's backwards & encrypted, but I'm sure it's mine! ...............
- just beacuse you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that the world is NOT out to get ya! -
this is totally ridicilous
what if I found three hundred flying goats, I wouldn't tell anyone. They'd think I'm fucked up or something.
Revealing the secret about my love to giraffes might plant a retarded status in my aura.
Got my point?
Yes, which dumbfuck would go out with this, unless he or she wants publicity, with the possibility to be laughed at as well.